Angry Maritime Steel Foundry owner leaving N.S.

Jafarnia plans to move to Ontario after frustrating efforts to get plant up and running

Abbas Jafarnia is selling his Stellarton house and the Maritime Steel plant in New Glasgow and moving out of the province because of his frustrations with trying to get the foundry up and running. (FRANCIS CAMPBELL / Truro Bureau)

STELLARTON — Abbas Jafarnia is packing up home and foundry and moving on with his life.

“I’m an immigrant. I thought Canada was the best place to live and the best place to do business,” said Jafarnia, who bought the century-old Maritime Steel Foundry Ltd. plant in New Glasgow for $1.25 million in 2011.

“My suggestion to whoever is going to come to Canada is do not come to Nova Scotia, because I worked in other places in Canada and it’s not like here. You can’t do any business around here if you are an immigrant.”

Jafarnia, a metallurgical engineer originally from Iran, said he has continually been rejected for government and bank loans that would enable him to get the foundry back up and running and create over 100 jobs in the area.

“There is no will at all to help any business in the area,” he said in explaining his decision to sell his house and the foundry equipment and move to Ontario.

Jafarnia said his original plan was to pump money from Iranian backers into the foundry that he purchased after it went into receivership, “but soon after we bought it, the sanctions started against Iran and we were not able to bring any money in.”

He said he has a three-year, $45-million contract already negotiated with a U.S. company to provide it with 125,000 industrial steel alloy components per year, but that isn’t enough to convince government it’s a viable business.

The province, under the Dexter NDP government, turned down Jafarnia’s loan requests of $2 million and $1.1 million in 2012, saying the loans were too risky.

“They started putting conditions in our face and none of them were, first of all, fair, and second, they were not doable for us,” he said of the provincial government.

“One of them was they asked us to bring money, the same amount that we requested from them. For example, if we were asking for $1 million, we would have to bring $1 million.”

Jafarnia said the province would not accept the foundry itself as collateral against his loan request for a business that had been able to secure government and ACOA loans in the past.

“I don’t have money to operate this business. The only thing that I have is Maritime Steel and its property and the government makes excuses that that property is not valuable to use as collateral.”

Jafarnia said he was hopeful that the change of government might alter his fortunes.

He said he sent emails to Premier Stephen McNeil before and after the election but didn’t get any satisfactory answers. Then, he said, the three Conservative MLAs from Pictou County approached Economic and Rural Development Minister Michel Samson in December and asked him to call Jafarnia.

Jafarnia said when he finally got in contact with Samson early this year, he was told that the goverment would be able to help him but there would be no handouts.

Since then, he said, he hasn’t heard anything.

Contacted Tuesday, a department spokesman said: “We are willing to work with Mr. Jafarnia and we have provided him with minimum criteria he must meet for further consideration.

“However, he hasn’t provided anything to us to demonstrate he has met those conditions. From the government’s perspective, there is nothing new to update.”

Graham Steele, the former economic and rural development minister in the NDP government, said in August 2013 that Jafarnia failed to meet the threshold required to provide him with public financial support.

“He has not met basic conditions we would expect from any business asking for support from the government — a commercial bank account and credit facilities, private equity, adequate security for the loan and enough profitable orders to support the business plan,” Steele said at the time.

Now Jafarnia, who feels that few of the politicians and even fewer from the business community in Pictou County were in his corner, said he has no choice but to sell. He’s already arranged to sell off the equipment in the foundry and will also put the building on the market. He’s in the process of trying to sell the home that he and his wife live in on a quiet suburban street in Stellarton. He said he has never been able to finish renovating the house because of what he’s poured into the foundry.

Jafarnia, whose two sons have already moved away to attend university in Ontario, said he will take a considerable financial loss from his 10 years living in Nova Scotia.

“I have a lot of pain in my heart,” despite gaining some true friends in the area, he said. “I’m sorry I couldn’t do much for the people around here. I did my best but I have a life, too. Just like any other individual, I have to take care of it.”